Coherence (2013)
Emily Foxler, Nicholas Brendon, Maury Sterling, Elizabeth Gracen, Lorene Scafaria, Hugo Armstrong, Alex Manugian, and Lauren Maher
Directed by: James Ward Byrkit

So this film has been on my watch list for years. I’d always heard such good things about it that I really wanted to see it. So yesterday I finally took the plunge. And I have to say, I’m pretty disappointed.

Eight longtime friends come together for a dinner party on the night that a comet is passing overhead. What begins as a fun evening devolves into fear and paranoia as strange things start happening.

SPOILERS INCOMING

I had high hopes for this film and, to its credit, it has some great ideas. The comet seems to affect reality, splitting it into what is probably infinite possibilities. The friends come to realize that walking through a “dark space” outside will bring you to another reality where exact copies of themselves reside, with just some very slight differences. That was all great. But everything else… not so much.

The acting, first of all, feels weird, very forced. I guessed that maybe a lot of the dialog was improvised and, after looking it up, saw I was right. But it wasn’t seamless improv. The actors (none of whom I’d ever seen before save Nicholas Brendon who played Xander on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) seem to struggle with thinking of things to say, so it all sounded hollow. They also ended scenes very abruptly with hard cuts to black, which was very off-putting. The camera work was just plain bad, all weird angles and shakiness. And the ending was very underwhelming. They could have done so much with such an interesting idea, but they chose the low-hanging fruit.

I’ll give it a few points for an original idea, but I can’t give it more than a 5/10. Such a shame.

M.

This film is currently streaming on Prime.